Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 436

This proves all musical instruments should have particle effects

Physical touch is something that's been sorely missing as music has become more digital. You're not going to see a producer going all Pete Townshend on his $10,000 dollar studio equipment. But a weird and wonderful acoustic research project by Felix Flair turns any hard surface into a tactical musical instrument, bringing back some digital-physical contact.

The installation, called Contact, uses some fancy-pants tech like contact microphones, passive sonar, and waveform analysis to recognize precisely where and with what part of the hand a surface has been hit. The beating is then digitally and head-noddingly turned into music. Wrist and fingernail hits trigger classic 808 Kick and Clap sounds, and the audio can be recorded and played back with a custom built loop pedal. It also uses projections to create a custom light-show based on the music played, which looks as awesome as the tech behind it sounds.

Watch below to be dazzled by the world's wildest drum kit/kitchen counter.

Star Citizen is 2 million shy of the singularity

The singularity is that beautiful, hypothetical moment in the future when technology becomes so advanced that our phones gain autonomy, start building robots, and the trajectory of machinery rockets into a supernova, the repercussions of which we can hardly begin to imagine.

Well, you best return to your seat, because Star Citizen is fast approaching the singularity. The crowdfunded little space sim that started as a humble way for Chris Roberts to make a spiritual successor to Wing Commander has surpassed the $39 million mark, and the next goal for the game is procedural generation. That means content generated algorithmically rather than manually, you know, as in computers creating computer games. As explained on their site, “building entire continents and atmospheres in the current system would take a lifetime. That’s where procedural generation comes in.”

The title has already incrementally hit an near-endless list of stretch goals, making the scope of the game huge, but there’s only so much human hands can do. The devs are asking for 2 million additional dollars, which is really just a drop in the ocean at this point, so they can develop AI that will populate the rest of the universe for them.

I’ll let them explain this one:

Advanced procedural generation will be necessary for creating entire planets worth of exploration and development content. A special strike team of procedural generation-oriented developers will be assembled to make this technology a reality.

It’s worth noting, with No Man's Sky and now this, how game worlds have gotten so big that they can’t be designed by mortals anymore. This sounds like an Old Testament prophecy of some kind, where either the Earth will be shattered and razed, or we will enter a new glorious eon. Who knows what’s next.

The awfulness and the importance of the dress-up game

The least-discussed genre in videogames makes a comeback.

The professor who discovered 80-year-old pixel art

If not for ASCII art, we wouldn’t have ASCII games like Candy box and Dwarf Fortress. And that would be terrible. So the way I look at it, we are greatly indebted to "ARTYPING," which was invented in the early 20th century and done on typewriters. Some early examples of this forgotten art-form recently turned up on the blog of Lori Emerson, an English professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. 

Along with a portrait of Shirley Temple composed of X’s and semicolons, she also posted some endearingly hokey old-timey excerpts from the book she found it in: ARTYPING (1939), written and drawn by one Julius Nelson, an instructor of Secretarial Science. In it he wrote that “really tremendous possibilities lie ahead to the ambitious, to the talented, and to the patient typist.” If he only knew.

The Clay That Woke: An RPG about Minotaurs is really nuts

I love how completely insane every aspect of The Clay That Woke: an RPG about Minotaurs is. The video on Kickstarter is 9 minutes of the game designer Paul Czege looking into the camera and speaking hoarsely about the incredibly deep world of minotaurs he’s dreamt up. The scenario for his tabletop game involves an alternate reality where minotaurs exist and have vowed to serve humans by doing menial and dangerous work, and most importantly, always keeping their mouths shut. When they can no longer hold their tongue, they retreat to the wilderness where they have surreal minotaur adventures that earn them more silence tokens. No shit. You can’t make this stuff up… unless you’re Paul Czege, apparently.

This professor discovers long lost ASCII art from 1939

If not for ASCII art, we wouldn’t have ASCII games like Candy box and Dwarf Fortress. And that would be terrible. So the way I look at it, we are greatly indebted to "ARTYPING," which was invented in the early 20th century and done on typewriters. Some early examples of this forgotten art-form recently turned up on the blog of Lori Emerson, an English professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. 

Along with a portrait of Shirley Temple composed of X’s and semicolons, she also posted some endearingly hokey old-timey excerpts from the book she found it in: ARTYPING (1939), written and drawn by one Julius Nelson, an instructor of Secretarial Science. In it he wrote that “really tremendous possibilities lie ahead to the ambitious, to the talented, and to the patient typist.” If he only knew.

Check out these strange but beautiful prototypes of Threes!

Over at re/code, the artist for Threes! has revealed some design prototypes for the elegant and minimal mobile game. It turns out it wasn’t always so minimal and elegant. The game went through numerous iterations before coming to the simple, clean look we know and play daily. But that doesn’t mean it was any less of a looker. You can track the evolution of its visual design from a set of lurid yet simplistic rectangles, to a rough approximation of tribal folk art, to cards of little monsters with googly eyes, to its final polished and clean look. I’d say it was worth the six-month effort.

Naughty Dog to flip coin to decide whether or not to make a Last of Us sequel

On Reddit, the narrative designer of The Last of Us has said there’s a “50/50” chance of a sequel being made, which continues a proud tradition of ambiguity on the issue. At one point, a sequel was deemed a remote possibility, with no chance of the lead characters of the story returning.

He told the PlayStation blog:

As far as the journey Joel and Ellie goes on it ends with this game. We were very conscious that we didn’t want to leave this story dangling. If we never do a sequel we’re okay with it, because we told the story we needed to tell.

But later, speaking to Kotaku, he had a change of heart, with the return of our favorite girl-and-surrogate-father combo no longer out of the question.

As far as whether we come back to Joel and Ellie or not, or whether we come back to the world or not, that's all up in the air. I can tell you there are people in the studio that would love to come back to these characters.

Then, a few weeks ago, talking to EuroGamer, a sequel was on the table:

To be honest, some of them are sequel ideas, and some of them are brand new IP…. It's kind of like how we approached Left Behind. Can we tell people a story that's really worth telling, and that's not repeating itself?

So it sounds like they’ve been thinking long and hard about another The Last of Us. This is not unexpected. It was an expensive, successful game, and expensive, successful games tend to get sequels. A sequel might undermine the impact of the original ending. But Druckmann continues to promise that they won’t do it simply to cash in, but only if they can think up a story worth telling. 

Eliss Infinity is the reason we’ve been poking at our phones for years

Prepare to touch.

The Old City is a game about thinking, and walking, but mostly thinking

A causal reading of The Old City's trailer suggests an existential stroll through the Old World—a mix of the pensive, first-person, narrative-driven exploration of Dear Esther with the burnt sienna of Dishonored. There might be a dash of La Jetée in there too. It sounds like one of those games that’s content to let you simply be. To quote the developers PostMod, “There are no weapons, no items, and no skill-trees.” But there is a beached whale that looks like it was painted in oil. And isolation. And the mind-body problem, which apparently is an issue for avatars too.